My new friend

Yesterday I went to visit my friend Billy at her nursing home. I volunteer with the local group Family Eldercare. They do outreach with the elderly and mentally and physically disabled adults, specifically the individuals in these groups who have no family or friends to look out for them. In the worst cases, these people have been victims of neglect or abuse by family members or caretakers at facilities.

Billy is the most adorable person I know.
She has long white hair streaked with individual black strands that she keeps parted in the middle and held back by a green-jeweled bobby pin on each side. Although she was born in Round Rock and lived her adult life – she will be 80 in November – in Austin, her native language is Spanish and that is what she is most comfortable speaking. She thinks her English isn’t any good. It’s great as far as I can tell. Sometimes she doesn’t know what I said, but I usually find that if I speak slowly, use simple words, don’t run my thoughts together, and face her direction, she can understand me just fine. These are usually signs of hearing problems, but her charts say nothing about this.

She does have a touch of dementia or Alzheimer’s. This time she remembered very well who I was, I had seen her last Saturday, and she asked about her social worker with Family Eldercare. I have only visited Billy a handful of times, about thirty minutes a pop. So far we’ve just chatted about her health, her childhood, the nursing home, my job, etc.

Billy likes beer. She brings it up every visit. “Do you drink beer?” Each time she asks, she leans in and looks me in the eyes, very earnest. I usually say something like, Yeah, it’s good. I have some every once in while. Then she tells me how she likes it, but they don’t let her have it there. Billy would drink several beers a day. She drank at home and in the park. She was basically an alcoholic – she would buy beer and wander around the parks all day while the niece she shared a one bedroom with was working or out with friends. Then one day, drunk, she tripped over a tree limb in a park and busted herself up pretty bad. This can happen when someone is 78 and not drunk, so it’s amazing it didn’t happen to her sooner. This is how she became a ward of the state and now a ward of Family Eldercare.

Yesterday Billy asked me about beer. So, I told her that that morning I had made beer ice cream. She chuckled and turned her head. She couldn’t believe it, beer flavored ice cream! We were sitting in the TV room and there was a man in there on a lounge-style wheel chair and he laughed. He said his name is Tony. He seemed like a real sweetheart. The whole time Billy and I had been talking, I could see that he would sometimes look in our direction and other times make noises that seemed like he was responding to what he heard. It was difficult to tell as he did not have very good control of his body, his speech was very thick and slurred, and he had trouble focusing his eyes on anything. But like I said, he did seem very sweet. And I loved that he thought the beer flavored ice cream was pretty ridiculous. Shortly after that, two of the staff came by and asked if he was ready for his nap. He shook his head no and the man replied, “You know Mama wants you to take your nap, are you sure?” Still, Tony said no. It is not a very nice facility, there have been some minor neglect issues with some of the residents, and of course the staff is overworked and underpaid.

PS Her name isn’t really Billy, there are privacy issues and since this blog is open to the public, I didn’t want to use her real name.